Hope that calf has health insurance so he can pay for a psychiatrist as he grows up. :-)

As to Mr. Beck, there are actually very few things that people do anywhere in the world that some denizen of the US doesn’t do here at home. Period. I don’t know about being a Blessed People, but holy we ain’t.

@Cassidy: I don’t think he’s saying its the same guy–but he is correctly pointing out that this specific kind of IED is quite easy to make with locally purchased materials and with easily aquired knowledge. You don’t have to be some mustachioed foreign villain with a degree in blowing things up to blow things up. I think that’s Dave’s point.

@aimai: Exactly. And that it seems like the people who use these kinds of bombs on soft targets (like Eric Rudolph at Centennial Park or the guy in Spokane) tend to be domestic terrorists and not evil furriners.

NPR this morning pointed out that an article with instructions for building that device was published by Al Queda in their Inspire magazine. NPR then said that the Aryan Brotherhood web site had published a link to that article. All kinds of possibilities for speculation there.

@Sean: Though it’s harder to hear through the snark, I think that’s part of Wonkette’s point. Gubmint isn’t “random” people and, somehow, the fact that T. McVeigh killed a bunch of little kids in day care isn’t the important bit. Sick and wrong.

I commented and it’s not here. I try to resubmit and it says duplicate comment. Fuck it.

@Dave: Gotcha. I thought you were implying same people, same org, etc.

@Raven: IED’s are easy to make, man. Hell, they teach us (Soldiers) to make them. Some of our HAZMAT Firefighters have gone to course taught by 3 letter agencies that involve bombmaking. I’m sure police attend as well. Those courses tend to teach more sophisticated stuff.

I’m guessing the sale of pressure cookers is way, WAAAAAAAAAAAAY down these days. No one could stand the glare of all 27 store employees and the every customer in the building giving you the thrice-over (and likely photographing you surreptitiously), half of them dialing the FBI and the other half unlatching their holster…

Beck, Collins and the rest of the right-wing idiots need to remember that the terrorist organization that killed the most Americans in history was the Klan and associated groups, who blew up children in churches and lynched 3,500 Americans.

Oh wait, those Americans had a distinguishing feature that made them not count.

But weren’t the streets and sidewalks of Boston built and maintained by evil government forces, using money raised by … taxes? Ought not any decent, freedom-loving Murkin boycott streets, roads, sidewalks, bridges, railroads, trails, parks, airports, piers, waterways, ferries…. and the like? Esp. on 15 April, when they should be at home wearing sackcloth and ashes. If on Beck’s logic people inside the federal building in Oklahoma (sorta) had it coming, why not people on streets at an event which undoubtedly at least involved government participation?

What a joke both these media types are and even our history books – as I pointed out in another post, this country used torture routinely and for many decades on end killing/injuring countless thousands when it came to the death-camp like prison system created for blacks in the south.

As for amerikans blowing up amerikans … lets see, we also had a civil war started by a select group of southern terrorist that killed over three hundred thousand amerikans. This country has some very sick people both today’s and in our past – lynching often involved burning the person alive as they were hung as whites had a picnic with children to enjoy the show. Yeah, we aren’t evil at all.

Not true at all. Sorry, but you can diferentiate between different batches of the “same” material – and forensics specialists do so regularly. They won’t make your mistake of assuming that “generic” materials all have the same, identical composition. They certainly aren’t going to rule out any possible source of data by making the assumptions you’ve made.
At the absolute minimum, they’ll want to analyze the composition of the gunpowder to see if they can obtain matches on the skin/in the living space of any suspects. And no, you can’t just assume that the pressure cookers were sourced via a flea market and are therefore untraceable. Your approach would discard an enormous amount of possible data before the investigation ever got going.

@shortstop: It means “Okay, but I hope you know the guy in Bones who breaks everything down to soil components, what bugs are eating and shitting when and saves the day is a fictional character”. The artist chick is a fictional character too.

@Morzer: You completely misunderstood me, I’m assuming. People buy bulk gunpowder all the time. It’s not hard to get and even though different brands do have proprietary mixes, there is nothing special about it. I can get some today after work if I wanted and a lot of it. Hell, I can get it without any kind of paper trail whatsoever because I have acquaitances who reload and keep a stupid amount of gunpowder on hand in suburbia. Assholes if you ask me, but oh well. The point is not that these items don’t provide data, but that they’re not special. Of course, this is assuming that the individuals in question are smart enough to not use their credit card(s) online and buy super awesome such and such gunpowder, but instead walked into [local large gunstore] and said “I need some inexpensive gunpowder to make some reloads”. That’s why forensics relating to bomb components tends to focus on the detonators and other electrical components and they talk about a “signature”. When someone is building a bomb, once they know how thye tend to stick with that method; it’s not exactly a hobby where you try something new to see if it works. That’s how we were able to traingulate and find bombmakers in Iraq.

Secondly, unless this person(s) is a complete idiot, they didn’t go out and buy brand new pressure cookers and register them online with the manufacturer. You can get that kind of thing at any Goodwill and flea market and every city has several and you can pay cash. Again, I’m not saying discard the information, but the likelihood of it meaning anything is very low.

So, I have thought about it, been taught some classes in it, a few classes in site exploitation, etc. I’m not sure where you’re from, but in the South, it’s not uncommon for the local rednecks to build gunpowder bombs and go do something stupid out in the sticks. Occassionally the get a Darwin Award for it.

The point is not that these items don’t provide data, but that they’re not special.

I think what you’re discounting is that the individual items may not be special in and of themselves, but they can tell a story when you combine them together. A random guy who walked into any random gun shop and bought gunpowder might not be noticeable, but when you are able to combine all of the available information and pinpoint that he probably bought this otherwise unremarkable gunpowder in X town that has Y number of gun shops, suddenly that data point isn’t quite as useless as it was when it was isolated from everything else.

ETA: I’m thinking of the attempted bomber who tried to build one with hydrogen peroxide. You can buy hydrogen peroxide in any drugstore, but once they knew the geographical area where the guy was, they were able to track him down through those purchases of a completely unremarkable ingredient that’s far more anonymous than gunpowder.

Justice Department documents did not name the alleged co-conspirators, but said that three other Denver-area residents had bought unusual amounts of chemicals from beauty-supply stores, including hydrogen peroxide and acetone, which can be used to make explosives.

“No true American sets off bombs” is what Beck is likely thinking. Just like how Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed. If you define something to not have happened, lo and behold it will not happen!